Shakin' the Family Tree

A never ending journey...

Musing on William Burris, born 1782

Not only mine. A whole bunch of us would be ever so pleased to find out the identities of William's parents and sibs.

In my GEDCOM, I say he was born in North Carolina. From a written family history of one of his grandsons in 1937, we learned that William was an indentured servant in his youth, brought to Lawrence County, TN by the man who held his papers, and lost track of his birth family. The same grandson repeated what the rest of most of William's descendants have heard in our family lore - that William's family was Scotch-Irish.

William married and had a huge family in Lawrence County, including my g-g-grandfather, James Littleton Burris.

Because so little is known about William's origins, I made a semi-educated guess that he came from North Carolina.

This morning, I was reading through History of Tennessee (Goodspeed Publishing, 1886, ebook edition publ. 2010) again and on page 750, found additional evidence that William probably emigrated to Lawrence Co., TN from North Carolina with his employer. The settlers came chiefly from North Carolina...

Following that sentence was a list one and a half pages long of the names of heads of North Carolina families who settled Lawrence County before the year 1818.

And I'm guessing that William's employer's name may be on that list, but I haven't a clue who he was...